How not to get pwned at Defcon

[binarynomad at gmail.com (Brian H)]

So, I'm curious,

I always take a laptop to Defcon for note taking, but out of paranoia  
I almost never turn on the wireless, I have a few times when I've  
booted from a Backtrack CD, but even then, when I get home, I reimage  
the laptop.

I also put my iPhone into airplane mode the entire time I'm in the  
hotel, until I'm out on the strip (which is a kinda nice, not being  
reachable).

The question is, I've not kept up on the latest on cellular network  
sniffing/hacking.  I almost expect someone at Defcon to have an  
antenna to sniff my Cellular data just as easily as my wifi data.  Is  
this too paranoid?  Can they only sniff but not MiTM? Etc.

----
Brian H
binarynomad at gmail.com
http://www.binarynomad.com

On Jul 14, 2009, at 2:07 PM, Robert Portvliet wrote:

> I guess there's two ways of looking at this...
>
> 1.) Play it safe, disable your wireless & use an evdo card, stay off
> the hotel & wireless networks, which means you're safe accessing your
> email & whatnot this way, but not much fun (imho).
>
> 2.) Wipe machine & re-image (to remove anything personally
> identifiable) before you go to defcon, patch thoroughly.. then go have
> fun, make sure you don't access anything personally identifiable from
> that machine while you are there & wipe it again when you get home.
>
> #2 supposes you use phone instead to check email, etc. or have a
> second notebook configured as in #1..
>
> How does that sound, good yes/no?
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 4:31 PM, Robin Wood<dninja at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 2009/7/14 Nicholas B. <nberthaume at gmail.com>:
> > > I an entirely read-only approach when on-site heres how I plan on
> > > approaching it:
> > >
> > > On my laptop if:
> > > Disable hard drives in bios, change bootorder to optical media first
> > > and only, set bios password, use my choice of live cd, disable
> > > wireless and tether to my evdo adaptor via usb.
> > >
> > > When accessing anything external from the laptop:
> > > SSH out via public key with key from a thumb-drive that's set to  
> > > read
> > > only and has a pass-phrase protected key and tunnel to a trusted box
> > > only with a pre-accepted and verified host key from the thumb drive.
> >
> > So after going to all this trouble, what are you going to actually  
> > use
> > your laptop for? If you are disabling any mass storage then you can't
> > download stuff so you are limited to browsing and reading mail, both
> > of which I'd guess you can do on your evdo phone.
> >
> > I'd like to know how many people start with these good intentions  
> > then
> > realise there is something they need from the hdd so mount it up then
> > just leave it on.
> >
> > Robin
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